DIGITAL MUSIC, RIGHT OFF THE NET

By MICHAEL KRANTZ

If the Web is alive with the sound of music, why can't you just down-load it directly onto a blank CD? In fact, you can--for a price. Writable (as opposed to read-only) CD technology has been available for years from companies like Philips, and the price of recorders, which until recently ranged from $1,000 to $1,200, has dropped as low as $700. Now Sony is aggressively marketing a minidisc recorder-player that sells for about $500. Blank minidiscs cost from $4 to $7 apiece--about half the price of the standard prerecorded CD.

But getting your hands on the hardware is only half the battle. Hooking a nonstandard CD recorder up to an industry-standard computer may take a bit of doing--even for someone who's not afraid to read a manual. Then there's the bandwidth problem. Downloading full-length music CDs over even a high-speed modem will clog your phone line for a lot more hours than it takes to drive to the nearest Tower Records and back. That's assuming you can find a full-length version of the music you want. The RealAudio versions of songs that most Websites make available are hardly CD quality, and the big music companies are careful to chop at least 30 seconds off any song they send over the Net.

Why does the industry make it so hard to download digital sounds? Because those raw strings of 1s and 0s represent their corporate crown jewels; once a master digital file falls into a pirate's hands, it can be copied and recopied, each new generation just as good as the first. That's why music companies are always looking for better ways to protect what's known as their intellectual property--if not with tougher trade laws then with more powerful encryption.

Not long ago, IBM and Blockbuster toyed with the idea of using digital-music files to generate in-store CDs tailored to customers' specific preferences--a practice already common in the piracy-friendly Third World. The industry didn't exactly welcome the plan with open arms. In fact, the big labels howled and threatened to withhold their hottest titles. IBM and Blockbuster quietly let the idea die.

--By Michael Krantz. Reported by William Dowell/New York

With reporting by WILLIAM DOWELL/NEW YORK